WRV Artists’ Project is a collective of artists who work together to support environmental activism through art-practice. We began as 9 artists, on the initiative of its curator Juliet Fowler Smith, to support the movement to protect the Williams River, and the locality’s unique heritage, community and productive agricultural land. After plans for the Tillegra Dam were abandoned in November 2010, we extended our attention to other areas of NSW threatened by environmental degradation.

While We
Sleep is a WRVAP project that is part of FIELDWORK: artist encounters, an exhibition project curated by Gary
Warner, that creates spatial, conceptual, sonic and material conversations
between recent works of a collection of artists with decades-long practice
trajectories involving, in various ways, work in the field or of the
field.FIELDWORK: artist encountersis open 11am - 5pm Monday - Friday and Saturday 11am - 4pm at SCA Galleries, Sydney College of the Arts, Balmain Road (entry opposite Cecily St), Rozelle, NSW.

While We Sleep is a
collaborative exhibition that includes both collaborative and individual work
by WRVAP artists Suzanne Bartos, Neil Berecry Brown, Sue Callanan, Juliet
Fowler Smith, Noelene Lucas, Margaret Roberts, David Watson and Toni Warburton.
It draws on our visits to Bylong, Bulga, Maules Creek, Wollar and other places in NSW where
we engaged with communities who are working courageously to protect themselves
and their environment from the devastating onslaught of big coal mining.

Friday, April 29, 2016

Col ‘Midget’ Faulkner still holds
the record, he says, for the longest tube ride on Sydney’s south side. Never
one for publicity or competitions, Col – not to be confused with Bernard
‘Midget’ Farrelly – watched the greats come and go, and gave most of them more
than he got: even world-champion Nat Young once made the mistake of dropping in
on Col’s wave at Cronulla Point!

Nowadays Col lives a long way from the surf, in the tiny, dying hamlet
of Wollar, 50 km north-east of Mudgee, five hours’ drive from Sydney. He lobbed
there 30 years ago to visit his uncle, helped out with the shearing for six
months, and never left. Col loved the peace and quiet - of being quite a way
from anywhere. But for the past decade his town has been stealthily besieged,
its social fabric eroded by the insidious intrusion of multinational Peabody
Energy (the world’s largest private-sector coal company – recently declared bankrupt
in the US), which operates the Wilpinjong coal mine, ever-closer to town. The NSW
government is currently considering (i.e. about to approve) Pit 8 – an
expansion which will bring more unacceptable dust, noise and division to the
town and its dwindling population.Already residents have lost the mechanic and the hardware/stockfeed supply … and the school’s down to eight pupils. Since the bottleshop closedthere's not even anywhere you can buy a drink.

Bev Smiles’
prescient COAL IS OVER! placard, Newcastle 2008

Photo: Sharyn Munro

On the invitation of long-time local anti-coal campaigner Bev Smiles,
members of WRVAP attended a meeting convened in the Wollar Memorial Hall on 20 April 2016 to discuss ways in which the townsfolk might get
a better deal (or rather, how a really bad deal from an industry now in its
death throes, might be sweetened)…

Wollar Memorial
Hall

After a number of residents (including Col) have had their say, several
of us speak against the mine expansion – about degraded environments, compensation
for ravaged social fabric, and mine remediation. Although the meeting is
locally framed we feel impelled to emphasise that the extraction and burning of
coal is currently destroying not only Wollar’s but the entire planet’s social
and environmental fabric. [Only the day before we’d learnt that the corals in Sydney
Harbour were bleaching due to dangerously warm ocean temperatures]. After a
comfortable night’s sleep @ BIG4 Mudgee we drive back to Wollar next morning to
take some photos. In the car we re-visit the complex traumas of coal mining and
struggle once again to devise a manner in which we might capture its inhuman
face, its incalculable costs within the spaces of a Sydney art gallery. Suddenly
I see Col pacing within a cage, a white-maned man/lion neutered by
circumstances beyond his control, speaking to (and perhaps growling at)
visitors. When we meet him again later that morning I tell Col that we might
need HIM for our exhibition, adding
‘but you probably wouldn’t want to come down to Sydney, would you?’. ‘Na’, he
drawls, ‘I got outta there’.

What we do

Our process is to familiarise ourselves with places under threat across New South Wales by being observer-supporters of activist campaigns underway to protect them. We use these as 'research residencies' for exhibitions and publishing that use the witnessing role of art to draw public and art-world attention to environmental debates and to the remarkable work of front-line activists. The events and campaigns that we have attended or in which we have participated in this way, are posted on this blog. After the community campaign against the Tillegra Dam was won by community activism in 2010, we moved on to the threat of coal and CSG mining, especially in the Bylong valley, the Leard State Forest and Bulga. This blog documents the exhibitions and publications that we have produced through this process.